Interviews - Young Guns
Various - Premiere - August 1988 It's one of those nights when you can see your breath here on the set of Young Guns in Cerrilos, New Mexico: good weather for boots and coats and long, hard looks - good weather for making a western. And what better badass to blacken the mood than the key actor in this next shot, Jack Palance? Tonight on set, he stands as a dark centerpiece to the Murphy-Dolan gang, the bad guys. Well, he'll be standing there soon. Palance is a little late, maybe fifteen minutes, and the cast members, among them his son Cody, are starting to shiver and dab their noses. When Palance turns up, he flubs his lines repeatedly. Some of the women in their dancing finery look mighty cold, and even Palance looks chilled. In time the scene is filmed and Palance dutifully reports to a storefront on the main street. For Palance, work in the western genre that defined him is simply another payday. For the virtual kids around him, it's a mission. "I don't like getting on a horse anymore," he's saying as the interview starts. "It'll be interesting to see if they can bring the western back." This one, it's pointed out, is a truer story than previous versions. "Yeah, I read that." A thin smile. "I don't know, maybe it is true, Hooray for Billy, but what about the seventeen or twenty people he shot in the back?" --- "I'm sure a lot of people are hoping for any grain of information that there's a prima donna attitude on the set - the guys don't get along, his trailer's bigger than mine, all this nonsense - but it's just not happening," says Lou Diamond Phillips, ponytailed and packing the several knives his character employs in Young Guns, as he leans against the wall of a hut where a heater chuffs ineffectually. During a break on the set, Phillips is talking about the risks, complications and general hooey involved in making a picture with several stars instantly famous Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Phillips himself. Mostly, he says, the Young Guns play Pictionary in the Santa Fe Sheraton. "Matter of fact, I've developed my Charlie sheen imitation." He doesn't require much encouragement. "Okay, this is Charlie guessing at Pictionary," he says, hunching slightly and tilting his head Sheen-style, brow furrowed as he lets young Charlie's burring, clipped syllables come into his own voice: "What is it, it's - is it a dot? It's an abyss, It's the universe imploding. The end of civilization in the 20th century as we know it, Is it a chair?" --- The door swings open and hoisting himself out of a glossy white super fly ride is the picture of a sharp dressing young gun, Kiefer Sutherland. He's hollowed-eyed, pale and feeble from a three day virus that will soon take its toll on a good many people here. The special delivery comes because Sutherland got up from his sick-bed for a scene in which his character, Doc, falls in love at first sight with a Chinese girl. But the cough accompanying his illness simply won't quit and Chris Cain thanks Sutherland for the try and wheels around for a different setup. Every lost day is costly on location, but even more so on this one. Young Guns is being shot and edited with exceptional speed, to take advantage of the late-summer release date that will best exploit its group of youthful drawing cards. "Chris uses two to three cameras all the time and he can shoot for eight hours and get 40 setups," says Sutherland. "Every film I've done we bust out ass twelve hours to get twenty setups." Or as Dermot Mulroney, another of the six actors who make up the gang of the title puts it, "They're just jackin' this movie out." --- Billy the Kid is not necessarily the hero, although Emilio Estevez gets top billing. Sutherland, listed next and Phillips, after him, are arguably on a par in audience appeal with Estevez and his brother Charlie Sheen, who's in only half the picture and is billed fourth. "I'm in an interesting situation," says Mulroney, who follows Casey Siemaszko in the credits, "as is Casey. We play the fifth and sixth in the group, and the first four are really well known as actors and stars. We got nothing to lose." --- John Fusco who wrote the screenplay took Estevez down to Lincoln, where the war between Billy the Kid's band of "regulators" and a rival fraction actually took place. When Terence Stamp signed on to play John Tunstall, the Englishman who organized and led the regulators before being assassinated, Fusco gave him an out-of-print copy of Tunstall's published letters Fusco's interest in this western far predates their meeting. "It's been an obsession since I was nine years old," says Fusco "When I first saw the tintype photo of Billy the Kid, what hit me was that it didn't correspond at all with the legend of the noble bandit: Robert Taylor dressed in black, the left hander who whistled sad ballads, the lady-killer. I looked at the young man in the photo and said 'No, there's something else here. This is a ferret in a derby.'" --- "He's an extremely cocky character," says Emilio Estevez of the outlaw who had already read several dime novels about himself before he died, at 22. "I've been working on developing a walk between something awkward and something cocky. He's a reactive character. Chris said he never wants to see Billy thinking. As an actor you're trained to think on-camera, so I'm having to unlearn everything." Similar, perhaps to the serial killer his father Martin Sheen played in Badland? "The similarity would be that they both saw their gun as a magic wand - anyone he didn't like who bothered him, he'd sort of wave his magic wand and that person would disappear. Billy's the same way." "Chris is really pushing for the dangerous side," says Fusco "He really wants to bring that out with Emilio. You see it in the killing of Henry Hill in surprise in a bathroom Billy finds that really funny. Emilio brings out that unhinged quality of Billy." For Estevez, Billy's one dominant motive is that "he understood the true meaning of revenge: they killed his mentor, the only man who ever really cared about him. But then as he became more infamous, it became a matter of survival." --- The role of Dick Brewer, a Tunstall foreman who tries to run the gang by the book before being slain by a bounty hunter, landed with Charlie Sheen abruptly after Sheen's project, Johnny Utah was postponed by Columbia Pictures. "So, I called Emilio and said, 'This is really bad, I feel like shit.' So he said 'Call Chris Cain. Dick Brewer has not been cast, we can play bitter rivals on film.'" Cain had been a family friend since the days when he coached Little League teams against the squads Sheen played on. --- Another late, cold evening in Cerrillos and tonight it's Lou Diamond Phillips on display. His scene will involve a couple of tricky knife moves and a good dose of Mexican-Indian knife fighter attitude, but he's in his usual easygoing mode - fetching his wife, Julie Cypher, a cup of tea. When Cain brought him the role of Chavez y Chavez, Phillips said he wanted to be sure the character's Navajo Indian half got a full credence and exposition: "He's a killer, a 'savage,' and at the same time very mystical, the quiet one. Maybe even an outsider among outsiders, stoic, but hopefully not too much so, cause that's cliche - the unsmiling, monosyllabic thing." There's more than a dab of formula in the figure of Chavez, with his dual ethnicity and his several knives. Phillips give notice that Chavez bears watching: "In the first act of the movie the audience will think, 'I've got this guy pegged.' Then you take it in another direction, give the audience something new and fresh. It's a challenge not to give away too much at one time." Phillips has to go back to work soon, but he's got one more verbal snapshot. Picture him and Kiefer Sutherland side by side in a chartered jet. They've just premiered a 60 second teaser of Young Guns for foreign exhibitors, shaken a bunch of hands, early call tomorrow, but for now they're kicked back. "Wouldn't you know it," says Phillips, "we hit turbulence on the way down." A little knife fighter grin here - Chavez is a long way from doomed, good hearted Ritchie Valens (Whom Lou played in the movie La Bamba) who went down in a plane. "And Kiefer turns to me and goes 'La-la-la-la-la-la Bamba'. I said 'Shut up, I'm gonna whack ya, shut up right now." --- "They're devoted to him, and he's devoted to them." Says Terrence Stamp of his character John Tunstall. "Because Tunstall sees the best of them, and they respond to that." After he's out of the cold for a few minutes, Stamp's real, Tunstallian warmth for the young guns becomes evident. "In a way, they're more evolved than I was their age," he says. "I mean Emilio's directed a movie. Last weekend, when I was watching the sunset, he was having script conferences with some great writer who had flown out from L.A." If there's no such thing as a kid born bad, and part of William H. Bonney's problem was his lack of a father, Tunstall is treated in Fusco's script as Billy's last chance. "Their bond is particularly close," says Stamp, "and you see another side of Billy. That's where Emilio's so wonderful, cause he really does give it to you - these wonderful expressive eyes, and they're very pale, so a lot comes through." --- Earlier Emilio Estevez had come up to show Sheen an antique Colt six-gun, just bought from the prop man. "It's mine," he said as they both looked at the dully gleaming thing, the way a younger pair of brothers might appreciate a freshly dug mess of night crawlers. "Beautiful," Sheen replied. "How much did you pay?" Four and half came the reply and they were off on a shared tangent. Now Estevez glances over to where Sheen is joining his fellow regulators for what is slated to be his final setup: "We're gonna miss having him around." Sheen's last scheduled day of work is an easy one. He stands around with the gang while Billy's early clippings are read aloud, and his last small chore Brewer's bloody death having been shot days before is to recite one line: "Fargin' birds scare the Jesus out of me." He does two, three takes, throws in one with a Scottish accent that cracks up the group and causes assistant director Myers to bark for silence. At last Sheen is done, and Myer's says "Thank you. Will you get out of the fargin' way?" But there's a pause long enough for Sheen to hug the gang, among them Sutherland, who waits a beat then fixes him with a teasing grin: "more close-ups for us." Lou Diamond Phillps - Film Review Jan 1989 Lou plays Mexican Indian Jose Chavez Y Chavez, who's based on two characters - the real Chavez and a 15 year old knife thrower. One of his closest colleagues on Young Guns was Kiefer Sutherland. They've been friends since a chance encounter in an L.A shopping mall which led to a month of work together. "We hit it off very well and, as is the case when you meet someone you respect, you say: I hope to work with you one day. The nice thing was that within a month we were." "As a result of being friends there was a lot of mutual admiration and support among the whole lot of us," says Lou, who was already a friend of Charlie Sheen. The Young Guns billing is a studio dream, but what could have turned into a clash of young buck's egos was more like summer camp. "It was a serious film but we had a great time together. Anytime you got too serious about your work, I think you get a little too tight. The nice thing about it was that we were not only all the same age, but at the same stage in our careers. We could sit around and we understood what each other was going through. You have Charlie (Sheen) who has just gone through the magazine cover superstar thing. That's now happening to me and Kiefer. It's happened to Emilio in the past, and it's gonna happen to our co-stars Casey and Dermot. So we got to sit around at night and say: 'Wow how do you feel about this.'" Lou's sense of humour enlightened nights around the campfire, with his talents as a mimic turned against Charlie Sheen. Mimicking the famous furrowed frown for which Sheen's so renowned, he had his fellow stars in stitches. Young Guns marks something of a comeback for the western, but it's a western with a difference. This time it's a western with a youth perspective. "That's why Young Guns is such a success in the States, because of it's youth. But I see we're breaking some ground, moving away from today's youth movies; romanticism, which gives a certain larger-than-life nobility to the teenagers that isn't accurate. Young Guns shows us afraid, shows that the violence is frenetic, that Billy is crazy. Chavez shows emotion and Doc is sensitive. With this film you're starting to see a more realistic edge." Lou's character, more than any, is responsible for taking this youth western into uncharted territory with his portrayal of Chavez. Employing the Navajo tribal tradition, his drug potions send the gang crazy. "The mysticism was very important to me, that's very much the Navajo side of me. Most of my research came from a book on the Navajo religion given me by writer John Fusco. A lot of people in America had the 'just say no' attitude. This upsets me because in 1878 'just say no' did not exist, not to mention the fact the Navajo's are allowed to by law. It's part of their religion, I was upset we were accused of being irresponsible depicting that." It's the first time there has been a surreal drug scene in a western, and it's Lou's make-up which serves to underline the ritual. "The make-up was my idea. The religion was a strange mix of pagan and Catholicism. I tried to bring out that in the scene, using make-up and the crucifix symbols. Christopher Cain, the director, allowed me to do the scene the way I felt."